Design
Overview
The Design stage of the toolkit covers some of the key activities that will help organisations design their shared service solution. Or, if procuring an established shared service from another organisation, help understand the scope, how to evaluate this and the changes that will need to be made.
Key activities in this stage include understanding current and future processes and the difference between them.
Where you are implementing an ERP system, you will make decisions about configurations and undertake conference room pilots to understand where the solution meets your requirements and where there are differences. Where there are differences you will need to make a decision whether to change your policy and processes or customise the system. To enable benefits to be optimised customisations should be mimimised.
You will also need to define the technical architecture, design the organisation and future governance arrangements and develop the service management framework.
The toolkit includes templates, guidance and example documents to assist you in the above activities. It will help you produce a detailed description of your shared service and how it will work.
Key Considerations
- Do have any critical requirements including performance and MI? Can you identify the requirement owners? Are they really essential? Often organisations have historical requirements that aren’t challenged and lead to inefficiencies in the design.
- Do you have a thorough understanding of your current end to end processes have you mapped these against the standard offering, do you understand the differences, and do you have justification for any non standard steps? Can you make changes in your business to enable the standard process to be adopted?
- Have you avoided/minimised customisation of ERP solution? If you don’t this will increase cost complexity and time to both the programme and future running.
- Have new organisational structures been agreed? Have roles in the service centre and retained functions been defined?
- Do you understand the split of responsibilities between the shared service centre and the retained functions and have the hand-offs between the two been articulated and understood?
- Where there are hand–offs, have you agreed the need for forms and ensured that paper forms are mimimised and automated where possible?
- Are the roles and responsibilities of line managers and employees in the new processes understood? Does your change management strategy set out how new ways of working will be embedded?
- Have roles been mapped to the roles required for the IT solution?
- Do you understand how work will be organised within shared services e.g. by function, alphabetical, customer?
- Have you developed a service management framework? Does it clearly set out roles and responsibilities?
- Have the volumes in the standard service offering been defined?
- Have key performance indicators (KPIs) been agreed and is the data readily available to measure progress against them?
- Is achievement of the KPIs predicated on line managers and employees fulfilling their responsibilities timely and accurately? Is this documented? Is data readily available to measure it?
- Have you defined what happens when performance standards aren’t met or volumes are exceeded?
- Has the operational governance model been defined and agreed? Are you satisfied that your business needs will be given sufficient priority in the governance and decision making process. How will change and conflicting priorities be managed?
- Have you a workforce plan including identification of recruitment needs and redeployment of existing staff? Will TUPE apply? In addition to internal employees have you considered whether TUPE may apply between external suppliers?
- Have you invloved the Trade Union in discussions about changes to policy and process?
- Do you have a data strategy and does it identify what will happen to the data not migrated?
- How long will data be retained on any new systems? What paper documents will be retained, where and for how long?
- Has the detailed service that the shared service centre will provide been documented?
